Workcations: The travel trend mixing work and play

“After working from home for over a year, I needed a change in atmosphere,” says Vedika Bhaia, a Kolkata-based marketing entrepreneur and content creator. Last summer, she and a friend went on a 15-day backpacking trip through India’s Parvati Valley, trekking between hostels, exploring the natural environment and paragliding – all while balancing a full workload on a laptop.

Though she was used to working remotely, Bhaia says the ‘work-from-anywhere’ mentality created by the pandemic pushed her to take a trip that combined work and leisure. “I knew travelling would do wonders for my mental health and help me overcome the creative block I was having,” she says.

Bhaia is not alone; ‘workcations’ are becoming entrenched in many nations. Workcations combine work and vacation – booking a mountain cabin for a week while working a full-time job remotely, for example – and became popular early in the pandemic, as many knowledge workers fled cramped apartments during lockdowns. Workcations are an evolution of ‘bleisure’: travel that combines business trips with leisure trips; think of the familiar practice of hanging around a city for an extra weekend after a conference, or tacking on some PTO days while you’re away on a business trip.

Now, in the third year of the pandemic, even as Covid cases fall globally, there’s no sign of workcations slowing down as companies continue to offer remote work policies. Last year, a whopping 85% of 3,000 Indian workers said in a poll that they took a workcation in 2021. Over a quarter of Canadian workers say they want to take one this year; in a global study of eight countries, 65% of 5,500 respondents say they plan to extend a work trip into a leisure one, or vice versa, in 2022.